NARROW ROOMS

 

 

The human embryo is curled up in a ball with the nostrils placed between the two knees.

At death the pupil opens wide.

Vance De Lakes waited an interminable while in Dr. Ulric’s office. Every few seconds he would lose courage and make a motion to leave. The smell of carbolic acid, chloroform, whatever it was, always made Vance a little light-­headed in any case, and looking through the two medical books whose quoted sentences are above was as nauseating as the smells. There were extremely few magazines in the waiting room, and most of these were of interest only to farmers. The National Geographic was the only reading matter Vance could stand to open but “The South Seas Today,” and “The New Eskimo,” and the disappearance of the puffin, to tell the truth, did not mean too much to him.

“It’s about Sidney.” Vance had begun volubly when the Doctor stood before him gazing under knitted brows, and extending his hand which Vance did not take only because he did not see it.

Following the Doctor into his study, Vance shot a hasty look into the room on the left and saw a still fairly young man (who looked like somebody he had seen working on the highway) stretched out on a couch, his hands lavishly bandaged.

“I won’t take but a minute of your time, Doc,” Vance began. He held a big straw hat in his hands which he wore to protect his head from the boiling August sun, but in his haste to get to the doctor’s he had forgotten to put it on, and had carried it as one would a parcel.

The particular news which he had borne, the medicinal hospital smells, the brief glimpse of the man with the bloodstained bandages had made Vance begin to keel over, but the doctor quickly pushed his head down, and then seeing he was not going to pass out, pressed a smelling bottle to his nose.

“It’s Sidney, Doc,” Vance had begun, lifting his head up, and gazing helplessly at the physician. “He’s come home. . . . But don’t start so, Doc . . . It’s all right . . . He’s been pardoned. He’s a free man.”

That was how it began. Sidney was sent home from prison to us, pardoned, but he hadn’t been able to pardon what he felt about himself.

Sidney was a big fellow when he was sent up, and his extreme size made him look older than he was. At fifteen people sometimes took him for draft age.

Now when he came home from prison he looked considerably smaller, and younger. He looked almost as young as his kid brother Vance, who was twenty.

There were times now after he had got back when Sidney would go into his brother’s bedroom and behave as if he was going to ask Vance something, his mouth would open slightly and all the time he tried to speak he looked like he had been slapped. He really looked slapped all the time. Then having said nothing he would stare in the direction of Vance as if he was the author of all his pain.

“It hurts me more than anything else ever did,” Vance was explaining to Dr. Ulric now. “Sidney don’t want to go out to see anybody, and he’s not happy either when he’s with me. . . .”

“Why force him then?” the Doc retorted, smoking one of those dilapidated-­looking black cigarettes he had been puffing on for forty years. “Don’t do anything, Vance, at this time . . . That’s often the best way to deal with a problem. Most problems. Sort of let it go away from you . . . You mind me now, do you hear? . . . But I would like him to come to see me . . . Anytime at all tell him. But don’t you do anything right now. There’s nothing you can do anyhow but let him know he’s still your brother. . . .”

“But it was me who visited him in the pen,” Vance spoke like one defending himself. “Who else went there week after week, far as it is from here . . . And he never appreciated it! . . . All he ever asked about was Gareth Vaisey.” (Gareth was a neighbor boy who had been in a serious auto wreck about the time of Sidney’s trouble.)

“But, Vance, see it’s you he has come home to! . . . He didn’t come home to Gareth after all. . . .”

Vance quieted down. Dr. Ulric had that ability to calm one, not so much by what he said, he said very little, but by reason of his being himself so quiet. Then he had delivered most of the babies for twenty-­five miles around and perhaps the two speakers remembered at this moment ever so fleetingly that the doctor had delivered both Sidney and Vance. He was after all considerably closer to many of his patients than a father. Too close, the doctor often thought. Hence perhaps his insomnia.

“I’m too close to everybody,” Dr. Ulric had once said in a loud voice when he had had a glass too many of the huckle­berry wine which he manufactured himself down in the basement.

As he neared seventy Dr. Ulric’s face began to set in a certain way so that it resembled a door that has been nailed shut in a deserted house. His eyes were as bright as ever, perhaps brighter, the disc of the pupil appearing to move like a white fire, but his face in general gave the impression of belonging to someone who never expected anything again. His present was taken up with tasks which he held onto like a drowning man will to the sight of shore. Yes, his patients were as needful to him as air, and his ministrations were therefore not duty but necessity. And though his hands trembled too badly for him to deliver babies (it was his skill as an obstetrician which had given him his greatest reputation), he toiled from early to late with the sick and the discouraged.

He had leased out the many acres of fields surrounding his house to farmers to grow corn on. There was something about the sight of the corn—in the summer growing taller and heavier and then the gold sheaves in the fall and winter—which was nearly as important to him as his patients.

Sometimes in mid-­August he would walk out at some considerable distance into the cornfields and appear to be listening to the moving stalks.

The night Sidney De Lakes had shot Brian McFee to death at the Bent Ridge Tavern, Doc had paid no particular attention to the dead youth lying on the sawdust of the floor. It was the one charged with the shooting he turned his attention to; Sidney towered up all his six feet three inches, chest out, his back pressed tight against the wall, his palms slightly upraised, a cold sweat pouring down over his forehead and upper lip so that he appeared to be standing under a leaking eavespipe.

The Doc had opened his bag, called for a tumbler of water from the white-­lipped bartender, and taking up a tiny envelope containing powder, dropped some into the glass, stirred and then forced the solution past the clenched teeth of the new-­fledged murderer whose head had immediately fallen over the doctor’s hand as if to kiss or perhaps bite it. Doc had never seen Sidney since that day four years ago.

Brian McFee, aged twenty, had raised his gun at Sidney and threatened to fire because of an alleged insult during some heated argument which had arisen while they had been hunting together that day, prior to their going to the Bent Ridge Tavern. Sid, who was of course armed also, had (his lawyer later claimed) fired involuntarily, at least in self-­defense, when he saw Brian was raising his gun at him again, and the bullet from that shot had hit Brian in the left eye, killing him instantly.

During the trial in response to a question from the prosecution as to whether he was “sorry” or not for what he had done, Sidney at first had replied “I am not sorry,” which his own lawyer later had attempted to explain away owing to his “rattled” mental condition, but again under cross-­examination, Sidney had blurted out with regard to Brian: “He had hounded me for months, worried and nagged me each day . . . I am not sorry that nagging and worrying is over . . . But I cared . . . deeply for Brian McFee.” (He had added this statement also against the wishes or advice of his defender.)

To make his case worse, Sidney refused to tell the court or even his own attorney what was the nature of Brian’s harassment and nagging of him, and the exact origin of his quarrel with the dead boy. Sidney refused to speak at greater length about the shooting thereafter, and no one else could come forward to offer an explanation, not even his brother Vance, to whom the whole affair remained a gloomy puzzle.

Sidney was sent up for manslaughter.

Dr. Ulric had received a letter from Sidney about two months after he had started to serve his sentence. It contained only one line, with no salutation or leave-­taking. It read:

See that Vance makes something of himself.

(Signed) Sidney De Lakes.

Vance had thought the sun rose and set in Sidney, or so everybody said, but you didn’t need anybody to say it for you, you just had to watch. Dr. Ulric had once seen Vance lacing up Sidney’s boots at the start of hunting season. There was a peaceful expression on the boy’s face which recalled the look some people have when receiving the host. It had given the doctor pause.

The day or rather the morning after Sidney had killed his hunting companion, Vance had been afraid to go home. With his brother already in jail, he had been ashamed to be seen on the streets. For a while he had thought he would step into the First Presbyterian Church and occupy one of the back pews, but even here he was sure he would be observed or that his presence in the church be explained as counterfeit piety. Later on for a while he had gone into the depths of the cornfield behind Doc Ulric’s. Both the moving corn and the lights from the doctor’s house comforted him. But the damp in the cornfield (it was rather cold for August) and a rat running over his shoes made him, together with the terror of returning to an empty house, go up the back steps of the doctor’s house and rap on the screen door.

“I wondered when you’d show up,” Dr. Ulric had said. “Sit over there why don’t you . . .”

Another peculiar thing about Dr. Ulric was that though known for his bountifulness, compassion and devotion to the lives of his patients he was almost never seen to smile. His face was not sour or bitter, nonetheless, but some said (perhaps wrongly) that it was disappointed in aspect.

Vance had kept the tears back with the firmness and strength of a man who is determined to hang himself albeit with a poor cord, but now seated in the best chair in the house, with the doctor smoking peaceably nearby, and with the quiet of the countryside broken only by the songs of crickets and katydids, short convulsive sobs rose out of the corner he occupied.

Dr. Ulric’s one pleasure in life outside of his dark imported cigarettes was, when he got started, talking—talking not so much to you as around you, it didn’t matter who the patient was when he got started. He had been known also to talk to his cat, and these lengthy speeches usually touched on medicine, and came helped by his having read most of the 5,000 books in his library which spilled all over his fifteen-­room pillared house.

Vance had always been grateful that the doctor had talked that night not about the shooting and his brother but about bread, and that he had made no comment on his weeping until when it had got somewhat beyond control Doc stepped into the next room, fetching out some sort of surgical dressing “for you to bawl on, Vance.”

The Doctor had then continued his speech about (and Vance listened while choking back his sobs) the uses of bread in medical dressings from earliest recorded history up to today. Bread was once applied in water and oil or rosewater to soften abscesses (Vance would nod after a sentence or two of these bits of information). Mixed in wine it was for centuries used to treat bruises and sprains; stale bread or sailor’s bread, pounded and then baked again, was a remedy for looseness of the bowels. In wine again it was applied to swollen eyes (a quick glance toward and then away from the inconsolable one). Persons suffering from palsy were given bread soaked in water, immediately after bathing or fasting . . . With strong vinegar, stale bread was used to dissolve calluses on the feet. . . .

“Let me stay on with you, Doc!” Vance had burst forth at last. “I can’t go back to that house alone, can I?”

And without waiting for a response to this plea, Sidney’s brother sang out: “Do you think they will send him to the electric chair?”

“I do not,” the doctor replied immediately.

“Oh, thank you, thank you for saying that,” Vance murmured.

The first week he was back Sidney did not go out of the house at all. The beginning of the second week, around midnight, he came out of his sleeping room barefoot and walked through the parlor where Vance was mending a jacket belonging to his brother (he came out of jail with hardly a stitch to put on, and most of his old clothes didn’t look right on him anymore). Neither of the brothers exchanged a word. Vance could follow him with his eye as Sid strolled outdoors and passed into the little apple orchard, and finally sauntering over to a weathered bench he elected to sit down. After a long while he picked up a green eating apple resting at his feet, but did not offer to taste it, holding it gloomily and loosely in his hand.

Vance stopped sewing on his brother’s jacket; he averted his face slightly so that he would not seem to be staring at Sidney. Then he put out the lamp, leaving only the hall light burning. He walked over to the fireplace and poked the moribund ashes.

Almost before he knew it, Vance too had gone out to the apple orchard and seated himself next to Sidney on the bench.

“You got to go out by daytime too, Sid,” he commenced.

“Who says so?” came the crabby rejoinder.

“You got to face them eventually . . .”

“Why can’t we move from here?” Sidney wondered, touching Vance’s shoulder ever so lightly with his outstretched fingers. “Light out . . .”

“And leave the house and everything . . . ?”

“Sell it.”

“Who’d buy it, Sid . . . It’s most finished . . . See how dilapidated it looks even by starlight . . . It’s all but turned to powder.”

Vance waited in silence a while. Sid took his hand then in his, pressed it, then let it go.

“We could go swimming tomorrow over at Barstow’s . . . Sid, you always was a good swimmer and diver.”

“Yeah, I guess you thought so . . . anyhow. . . .”

The next day they set off about ten o’clock for Barstow’s. They walked through the south end of the cornfield which eventually showed up on Doc Ulric’s property, then past a stretch of cottonwood trees, up quite a sandy bluff, and at last down to the river itself.

Vance had stripped and had secured his clothes partly under some stones and was already in the water. Sidney, gazing at the river from the edge of the shore, dispiritedly undressed, but then at the last moment, although having already wet his feet to go in, he stood stock still, lifting his nose like a deer that smells danger.

A young man, about Sidney’s age, had just crossed down the sloping path that led to the river in his truck, behind which was a trailer with two young horses inside who were whinnying and kicking vehemently, one of them making the attempt despite the cramped quarters and narrow confinement to rear on his hind legs. The truck driver came to a halt, and staring at Sidney thunderstruck, had jumped out of his vehicle and advanced a few steps still wearing the awestruck look on his countenance.

Both Vance and Sidney recognized him as the “son of the renderer,” also called by the villagers the “scissors-­grinder,” and between whom and the De Lakes brothers there had always been “bad blood,” almost a kind of obscure and muted feud which many claimed was behind Brian McFee’s having been shot to death.

Roy Sturtevant, the newcomer or “renderer,” had stopped then, his bewilderment, if anything, increasing, and he had stretched out his hands finally not to greet Sidney or embrace him but as a further, and involuntary, expression of his incredulity and amazement at seeing De Lakes.

Sidney flinched and drew back several paces, for, as he was later to explain to Vance, the very sight of a man’s hands coming toward him since he had been in prison made him uneasy, but to see Roy Sturtevant approaching him in this fashion, unexpected as his coming had been also, was more than he could bear. It brought back to him in a dizzying rush all the terrible events which had led up to his having been convicted and imprisoned.

The “renderer” (actually only his Grandfather had ever really been in such a distasteful occupation, but both his son and Roy Sturtevant went on being called thus) slowly dropped his hands at his sides, blinked his eyes, and got out: “So, it’s you after all!” and then having spoken this, perhaps only to himself, he rushed back to his truck and trailer and disappeared, rousing his horses by his violent hurry to whinny and kick and even threaten to bite one another.

Vance slowly, almost mournfully, turned away from this brief spectacle of the meeting between two men who had long had some unspoken conflict between them which he had never begun to understand or wanted to understand, and he strove to swim out toward the direction of the little hills which he was always able to see from Dr. Ulric’s spacious back windows. When finally he turned round facing shore, he saw Sidney still listlessly stationed at the river’s edge, brooding and oblivious to anything around him.

“What did he want?” Vance wondered, toweling his dripping body, and it was then he saw the marks on Sid. He quickly turned away from looking at them so as not to embarrass him any more than he was already embarrassed. The marks or scars looked like somebody had decorated him with razor thrusts about his chest, and on past to his back and up and down his spine; red wales such as come from scourging were visible.

“Search me, Vance,” Sidney replied, a strange look both sad and almost ecstatic on his face. He began splashing the brown river water over his breast as if to draw attention now to the scars themselves, but then he held his hands and arms over the long row of irregularly healed wounds and blinked before he dove into the water. Vance watched him swim until his head was only a shiny black dot on the river.

Sidney refused to go swimming again after that day, and Vance did not urge it again.

“I do hate to leave you all alone by yourself,” Vance would say as their day’s routine began in earnest now, “but as I wrote you, I work for the doctor in his office nowadays . . . Sort of an all-­round helper. I type up his prescriptions, chauffeur for him, and prepare some of his meals, and keep his out-­of-­town appointments straightened out.”

Sidney nodded, but Vance was not certain his brother had even heard him.

“This evening I thought we’d take a little stroll uptown after it cools off,” Vance finished with forced pleasantness.

Sidney did not nod this time and appeared even further absorbed in his own musing, but just before Vance went out for the day the older boy smiled faintly and that cheered his brother so considerably that he went down the steps whistling.

“We strolled down Main street,” Vance confided later to the doctor . . . “Sid tightened up the minute we began passing the shopwindows and he saw his reflection in the glass  . . . I realized after a bit he didn’t at first recognize the reflection the windows was his own, he had changed so in every which way while he was in jail that he thought at first he was looking at the face of a stranger. He kept staring at himself in the glass. . . . We walked on then and pretty soon passed the Royal movie house which he had attended as a boy. Then we began to meet people we both half-­knew or knew casually, and they nodded and sort of grinned, sickly-­like, and that made things worse. . . . He walked like a man does through a gauntlet, with his mouth set and his jaw tight, and dim eyes. . . . Then we went into the Sweet Shop and seated ourselves clear in the back out of notice. . . . Oh, why did we do it after all? . . . We ordered sodas . . . well, he couldn’t drink his, and I wasn’t able to finish mine. . . . But anyhow he did it! He appeared! But on the way back he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to go to town again, hear?’ And then in rapid fire he says, ‘Did you see who was sittin’ in the seat directly facing ours? . . . No? Well, it was him . . .’ ”

“Him?” Vance had replied totally in the dark.

“Yes, him, the one who has always been doggin’ me ever since I can remember, Vance! You know very well who . . . The renderer!”

“Oh Roy Sturtevant again! Yes, I guess I saw him. But he ain’t in that occupation, Sid.” Vance heard himself slipping into the bad grammar his brother used and which Vance blamed on jail, forgetting Sid had always used such grammar, had always been a poor “scholar,” and that only his glory, short-­lived as it had been, as a halfback on the high school football team and a champion swimmer and diver disguised the fact that in all other ways he had never, in the opinion and phraseology of Dr. Ulric’s village, “amounted to a hill of beans.”

“His Grandfather was the renderer, Sid, a long, long time ago,” Vance heard himself repeating this worn bit of information to his brother’s deaf ears.

“I never want to set eyes on him again as long as I live . . . I feel he brought me all my bad luck. He was somehow behind my fall!”

Sidney gave his brother a look such as he had never given him before.

Vance gazed in return at him, dumbfounded. And something deep stirred in him, fear, suspicion, dread, perhaps something more and probably worse. He reached for Sid’s hand then, but the latter withdrew it. Then aware of the younger fellow’s disappointment at his withholding his affection, Sid took his hand tight in his heavy, rough grasp and held it to the point of pain.

“Sidney, why don’t you unburden yourself to me? Don’t you trust me? I know there probably was something between you and the renderer as you call him, and I have always wondered if maybe your quarrel with him had something to do with the trouble between you and Brian McFee. . . . I mean, Sid . . .”

“Don’t, please, don’t!” Sidney implored. (He acted, you see, like the younger brother and always had.) “I can’t bear no more after what I’ve went through in prison. But yes, for your information, I guess Roy Sturtevant had a hand in all that happened to me and Brian. . . . Don’t ask me to explain it, Vance, for I can’t. I mean I don’t understand it myself . . . Yes, maybe he’s behind it all.”

Sidney threw himself now into his brother’s arms and held onto him with might and main.

“You know about me anyhow, don’t you, Vance?” came his smothered voice. “Don’t you?” he cried on, pressing his mouth against his brother’s mended jacket. “You’re so good, Vance, it’s hard to feel worthy of you. You’re so straight and upright. . . . I guess maybe you suspicioned about what I am, and must have guessed the truth about Brian and me, that we . . .” ■

“It don’t matter now.” Vance broke away from his brother’s close embrace. His voice rose to a hysterical wail. “We won’t think about any of that . . . It’s over and done with. . . .”

“No, Vance, it’s not over and done . . . I’m trying to level with you, see, to explain to you. . . .”

“Sid, you’re all I’ve got.” Vance spoke now with almost the same fierce incoherence that had been Sidney’s a moment before. “It don’t matter to me what you’ve done anyhow . . . I’ve just waited for you to come back to me. I don’t have nothing else to live for. . . .”

“Don’t say that, Vance. For God’s sake, don’t please . . . I’m not worth that much when all’s said and done. . . .”

Going up to his brother, Sid spoke almost into the younger boy’s teeth: “You’ve got to find something worthy of you, Vance . . . You’re straight, and you ought to marry . . . Don’t bank your whole life on somebody like me, hear? . . . Forget me.”

“You are my life, Sid.”

“I hear . . . ,” Sidney began after a long struggle to find his voice. “I hear also you went to the Governor and that you got him to intercede for me.”

Vance barely nodded, for his own emotions were so topsy-turvy he dared not risk speaking at that moment.

“I would do it all again,” Vance managed finally to tell him, but in a voice so unlike his own Sidney turned quickly and gave him a look of eloquent wonder. “I would lie for you even, Sid, I reckon. Even if you had killed Brian McFee in cold blood . . .”

“Christ, Vance,” Sidney turned away. He struggled to keep down all the feelings that had threatened to erupt ever since his return.

“I know more than you give me credit for, Sid,” Vance was going on in this new voice, the voice of a stranger, imbued with and full of his new “knowledge.” “I was always pretty sure you thought an awful lot of Brian McFee too.”

Sidney nodded many times, and with each nod he pressed Vance’s knee with his fingers.

“Since you’re getting close, Vance, yes I did . . . I thought an awful lot of him, and he . . . me.” Then almost in fury: “Why do you think we went hunting so much anyhow? . . . But in cold blood,” he quieted down, “no, I never shot him in cold blood. . . . He felt, you see, I was turning against him . . . I wasn’t . . . I was, I mean, trying to gain time to understand my own feelings for him . . . But he couldn’t wait. . . . He felt he’d rather die or see me die than lose my caring for him. . . . So he kept shooting at me in the woods that day. . . . I run to the Bent Ridge Tavern . . . But you know it all, Vance . . . Cold blood, never . . .”

“That’s all you need to say, Sid. . . . You know I believe you.”

“I carry a terrible burden though in my heart, Vance . . . Cold blood, hot blood, whatever you call it . . .”

Sidney buried his face in his hands as he said the last few words. Vance hesitated a long while, then bending over him he pressed his lips to his brother’s neck. It was more like he had whispered a secret to him than bestowed a kiss. Sid took Vance’s hand again in his, and pressed hard again and again.

“There are these people I suppose who are destined to play parts in our lives,” Sidney had said to his brother later that night when Vance had come in to say goodnight to him.

But the thought and the way he pronounced the words were as unlike the old Sidney as it was possible to be.

“You won’t hold it against me now, Vance.” The older brother looked up then, perturbed. “For what I’ve told you tonight, I mean . . .”

Vance shook his head morosely.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” he whispered in the face of Vance’s heavy silence.

“No, no, Sid, you should have,” Vance forced a smile. “It’s my fault, Sid, for what Mama once explained it as my looking up to you too much. Remember?”

“I guess nobody could look up to me now, Vance, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not so, Sid. I didn’t mean that, and you mustn’t say it!”

Sid reared up in bed and pushed his back against the bedstead with almost the same kind of wild and frenzied movement as he had the night of the shooting when he had pressed his back against the wall as he stood facing the dying Brian McFee.

“I think more highly of you I believe than ever before,” Vance continued doggedly. “I know I am the last person on earth you would want to confide these things to, Sid. That’s my fault too. . . . But Sid,” and here Vance’s own voice took on some of the wildness of his brother’s, “promise me one thing, forget this Roy Sturtevant. Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to . . .”

Sidney stared at his brother like thunderstruck. Then he took him in his arms and kissed him fiercely.

“You don’t look on me as stained and dirty then?” Sidney cried in a kind of hopeful buoyance.

“You know better, Sid.”

Vance had not told Sidney he would confide in the doctor, but he had to tell somebody. He had to unburden himself and after all telling the Doc was like whispering it to the river by midnight. Yet he felt somehow he had done wrong. He should have kept Sidney’s secret locked in his own heart. He felt suddenly in the first wake of his disappointment and anger that Brian McFee deserved killing.

“So now you know,” Vance said with some ill temper in his voice. “Or did you, judging by your expression, did you always know . . . I suppose you did.”

“I don’t think of people as queer or straight,” the Doc said. “Not when you’re as old as I. And I don’t think God does either.”

“I didn’t know you believed in God, Doc,” Vance said in a choked voice, for his grief was getting the better of him again.

“Well, I believe in the soul I guess, the soul somehow that is one and is in everybody. I am not a thinker, Vance.”

He kept fingering a piece of paper. Actually it was a letter he had been poring over and debating whether or not to show to Vance.

“You have been worrying about Sidney not having a job,” the Doctor began, and Vance did not know whether to shout for joy or to curse the old man for his seeming indifference to his having told of the fall of his idol.

“Isn’t that a fact, Vance . . . You wanted for Sidney to have a job.”

“It is,” Vance replied.

“Look here, my boy,” the old man’s voice rose. “You have got to brace up now. The worst is over. He’s back.”

“Is he?” And then he broke down in a way that touched the old man more deeply than when Vance had come to pass the first night he had ever spent without his brother, when Sidney was already in jail and life bore down on him heavily.

“Vance, listen to me. You still have your hero. Do you understand? He told you, Vance. He confided. Don’t you see he returns your love more than he could return it to another man? Don’t you?”

“I want to,” he said between his choking and sobbing.

“Now brace up.” He went into the adjoining room. He poured something and brought it out.

“I don’t want it, Doc. I can take it without that.”

“Drink it. It’s nothing anyhow. Drink it, and then listen to this letter which comes from Mrs. Vaisey about her son.”

He drank and listened.

“You know the Vaisey boy, Gareth?” the Doc began.

“I do of course.”

“You remember he was in a train wreck?”

“And he was mixed up with the renderer if my own memory serves me.”

The Doctor exchanged a look of real wonder and annoyance with his “charge.”

“Gareth was the only one who survived the wreck when the fast train hit the truck and trailer he was driving. His father and Gareth’s two brothers died. . . . But later on, whether due to this wreck or his having been thrown from a horse and kicked in the bargain, well, he developed one might say a number of symptoms. He is a virtual invalid and seldom goes out. Gareth is now about twenty . . . His mother needs a caretaker. . . .” He tapped the letter against Vance’s cheek.

“No, Doc, no,” Vance cried. “Sidney can’t do that kind of work.”

“Why in thunder can’t he?” the Doc exploded. “He can and he must.”

“An orderly? A male nurse? Never.”

“Then what is he to do?”

Vance’s deep silence was the first step toward assent.

When they parted a few minutes later, the Doctor put his arm around Vance and held him to him for a long time. They had never been so close as then, Vance knew, and he had never needed closeness that bad before.

“I learned yesterday of a job that is open, Sid.” Vance managed to broach the subject the next morning as he was clearing the breakfast dishes (it was five o’clock in the morning, and outside the fog from the mountains had, if anything, grown more pronounced than at nightfall). “It’s thought, I guess, to be a real opportunity for whoever is interested.”

“A job I could fill?” Sidney wondered, his feelings still raw from the distance that would always he supposed exist between him and Vance.

“Yes, who else?” Vance’s voice took on a real edge. “There’s a position vacant at the Vaisey household . . . Taking care of the young man there who was in that un­usual train wreck some time back. . . . You remember him, of course.”

Sidney blushed beet-­red under his prison pallor, and looked down at his toast and eggs.

But Vance himself was so uneasy over bringing up the offer of the “opportunity” for his brother that he did not observe the confusion which the mention of the Vaisey boy’s name brought to the job-­seeker.

“I thought, matter of fact,” Sidney tried to recover his composure, “that maybe Gareth might have . . . died also by now, and that perhaps you had neglected to tell me . . .”

“I guess I should have kept you abreast of his condition,” Vance unbent a little, “since you used to inquire about him so often when I came to see you, I recall . . .”

“I guess I hated to keep asking you about him when the subject . . . well, seemed to displease you when I brought it up.”

“I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Sid . . . I should have offered you the news about him more willingly, I reckon. . . . Anyhow, the job there is going begging!” He finished this with a kind of exhausted fury and impatience.

“But, Vance,” Sid rose from his breakfast, and with good humor and encouragement in his voice, “you ain’t told me what the job is to be . . .”

Turning away from Sid slightly, Vance responded: “The offer comes as a matter of fact from Dr. Ulric, and I was sort of cool to it myself at first . . . But I thought . . .”

“But just tell me what’s expected, Vance.”

“This . . . Gareth . . . ,” Vance tried to control his own reluctance, if not ill humor, “is as you may know a sort of invalid, and needs somebody to take care of him. . . . The other caretakers never stayed more than a few weeks. . . . And Sid, to tell you the truth, I was afraid you might feel it was beneath you. . . .”

Sidney sat down in his chair again, and touched his coffee cup. “Beneath me?” he repeated, seeking for any sarcasm which might lie under this remark; but Vance was incapable, he decided, of sarcasm.

“An invalid now, huh?” Sidney’s eyes got that dreamy look they so often had. “In times past all Gareth ever liked to do was ride horses. . . . I remember his Dad told me once that young as he was he was capable of breaking in a horse, and as a matter of fact later I found out he had done so—broke several horses, in fact. . . . His dream was to be in a rodeo, or who knows, a circus . . .”

“But it was by breaking in a horse, I believe, Sid, that he got injured. At least riding this new horse, which threw him and kicked him also . . . You see Gareth was not injured in the train wreck. Only some little scratches, whilst his Dad and his two younger brothers were killed.”

“You know Gareth was part of the gang of boys that clustered round the renderer,” Sidney mused.

“Maybe we best drop the idea then, Sid. After all there’s plenty of time.”

“No, Vance, there ain’t, as a matter of fact. There’s not much time at all where I’m concerned. I’ll take the job if she will give it to me.”

“Oh I don’t think there’s any question she’ll offer it to you. She’s desperate . . . Excuse me, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. . . .”

“I’ll go.”

“But, Sid, do you really want to. I can’t stand the thought of you emptying chamber pots and paring the toenails of some non-­compos-­mentis boy . . .”

“But I know Gareth . . .”

This time Vance blushed for he wanted to but did not dare ask more.

“You see, Vance, I can’t just sit around here and live off you. . . . I tell you I’ll take it.” He stood up, and he smiled, and going over to Vance he punched him with his fist in the belly, and smiled broadly.

Mrs. Vaisey had offered to send her chauffeur over to fetch Sidney, but he insisted on walking the six or seven miles.

He was a bit winded by the time he had arrived, nonetheless. His opportunity for exercise in prison had been minimal, and all he had had for keeping in shape were a dilapidated punching bag and some weights. As a result of being confined or (who knows?) because of—as the prison psychiatrist put it—the weight of memory, his heart troubled him to some extent.

Sidney had spruced himself up considerably for the ordeal of meeting Gareth’s mother. He had put on one of Vance’s Christmas-­present dress shirts, a knit tie of neutral color, his dark hair was combed wet, and at the last Vance had insisted on manicuring his nails—Sidney always had had a tendency to keep his nails poorly, with black dirt under them, and the thumb nails more apt than not to be broken. His blue eyes shining in contrast to his extremely dark complexion gave him today a calm handsomeness and purity which was inconsistent with the epithet ex-­convict.

Mrs. Vaisey did not keep him waiting long for, contrary to rumor, she was not grand at all; and the story that she was rich merely because she lived in a mammoth mansion was inaccurate. The threat of foreclosure hung over her, and since Gareth’s accident, she came to realize that although she had constantly scolded him in years past with his immaturity, when the time came he was no longer himself, she realized then it had been he who had kept at the account books and prevented her from being outright ruined and bankrupt.

Gareth’s mother spoke to Sidney without embarrassment or self-­consciousness and there was no hint or mention on her part as to where he had been for over four years, and Sidney also felt that perhaps, since she seemed so scatterbrained and forgetful, that she might not really know he had been in prison. So he insisted on telling her at the very beginning of their conference.

“Dr. Ulric has told me all I need know about you,” Mrs. Vaisey had affirmed, thus closing any further discussion of this matter.

She was a much younger woman than he had expected, certainly under forty. Her blonde hair looked untouched by gray, at least in this soft light of the old house; her complexion was a rich creamy color, and the only jarring aspect to her appearance was her hands, which showed the effect of hard work so that one would have thought despite her having hired help she did her own dishes and scrubbed her own floors.

He could tell she was satisfied with him, and she said as much, but though she spoke of Gareth constantly and told of their visits to New York and Chicago to see famous specialists, and complained of the cost, she was, he felt, about to dismiss him for today without having let him look in on his “charge.”

“Can I see Gareth now, Mrs. Vaisey?” Sidney finally came to the point.

She looked a bit displeased at this, or rather, hurt. He on the other hand feared that perhaps he was to be hired because of Gareth and yet—who knows?—not be able to set eyes on him.

At last she nodded, and rang a bell. The girl who had admitted him at the front door came in, and Mrs. Vaisey spoke to her in a voice almost too low to be heard by Sidney. “Is Gareth dressed yet? . . . He’s had something to eat already? I see. . . . Will you just step in then and tell him I’ll be up directly with this young man.”

“You won’t have something to drink while we’re waiting?” she inquired of Sidney. He shook his head.

Sidney somehow had the feeling that they were in a train station, waiting for someone to arrive. But he knew in fact she was stalling for time.

“Life is very hard, Mr. De Lakes . . . But I don’t need to tell you.” This was her only indication that she had recognized and thought over thoroughly that he had been “in trouble,” the phrase people in this village use to cover prison, and being pregnant without a husband.

“I would like more than anything in the world to take the position,” he said in a loud voice.

She looked up as surprised as if he had spoken in Greek.

“I was quite prepared to take you before you got here,” she replied. “Dr. Ulric has never recommended anyone before.”

Just then the young girl appeared again and nodded to her employer. Mrs. Vaisey rose, and asked him to allow her to go on ahead.

He had not been quite prepared for so long a flight of stairs. And whereas she did not appear to notice them, he had to pause occasionally. “I suffer from a stitch in the side when climbing or walking fast,” he explained his pokiness.

“Perhaps Dr. Ulric should see you about it,” she commented when she saw the stairs had winded him. “He was no help of course with Gareth, but then the specialists weren’t either.”

“Mr. De Lakes, I must ask one thing of you . . .” She turned back to face him. “Please don’t let him see any extreme emotion on your face . . . If you could sort of look poker-­faced even . . . It’s hard for him to see outsiders. . . . So we’ll go very quietly now and look in on him, for I want you to be his . . .” (he felt, as she stumbled for the word, she had been about to say keeper) “companion. I do want you for the post, sir, and I hope you realize this.”

She knocked on the door then, and cried out in a voice which had almost a note of awe in it, “It’s Mother, Gareth . . . May we come in . . . I’m with the young man who has come to see you. . . .”

Sidney felt a thrill of terror too now, a remembrance of the emotion he had used to feel when Vance visited him in prison.

“Come!” a rather deep but almost childish voice responded.

Mrs. Vaisey opened the big milk-­colored door then, and they stood a moment looking into the large dimly lit interior.

A young man about twenty sat in a tall custom-­made chair, his hands folded over his lap. For anything there was of expression in them, his eyes might have been made of glass. But his mouth moved convulsively as he took in Vance’s brother.

“This is Sidney De Lakes, Gareth, who will be staying with us now. That is if you should wish him to, dearest . . .”

She almost pushed Sidney in the direction of her son.

“Gareth, good morning,” he spoke throatily and took the boy’s hand and lifted it, heavy as sand, from his lap and held it in his for a moment. The hand then fell back.

“I already know your son, ma’am, you see. From a while back,” Sidney managed to explain, but the look of confusion or astonishment on the mother’s face struck down whatever more he might have been going to say.

“And I hope we will be good friends again, Gareth,” the job-­seeker got out, but as he said this facing Mrs. Vaisey she gently moved Sidney’s face with her hands back in the direction of her son.

“It had slipped my mind that you two boys used to know one another!” Irene exclaimed as she watched the two young men stare now into one another’s faces. Confusion and wonder caused her voice to waver. “I for one,” she went on in a soft, almost prayerful voice, “am very happy Mr. De Lakes has agreed to be with us, Gareth, and I can tell by your expression you are also. . . . So,” she went on still more nervously as she studied their rapt scrutiny of one another, “we will bid you good morning now, Gareth, dear, until the proper arrangements can be worked out.”

“Does the renderer know you’re out, Sidney?” the young invalid inquired unexpectedly in clear, loud and almost menacing tones.

Sidney faltered only a moment. “I reckon, Garey, everybody knows I am by now.”

“Everybody don’t matter, Sid, and you know it. It’s him that matters . . .”

“We will not tire you further now, dear,” Mrs. Vaisey spoke with her usual cool authority, and bent down and kissed him.

“Mother,” Sidney’s “charge” now spoke in a kind of panic, “the renderer didn’t send him to us, did he?”

“Categorically not. Mr. De Lakes came of his own free will, dear . . . Because he knew you, as I have been reminded, and you see, he wished to be with you again . . .” Her voice trailed off and she turned toward the door.

When they were downstairs again, both Mrs. Vaisey and Sidney made no reference to the rather unexpected topic of conversation Gareth had engaged them in, though both of them were, strangely, upset by it.

“Will you tell me my duties, Mrs. Vaisey,” Sidney sought to know in the face of her perturbation.

“The simplest,” she attempted to rally now, and smiled. “The main thing is merely that you be near him. I had no idea that you had been friends!” She stopped and a frown passed briefly over her face. “But that’s all to the good. . . . I don’t suppose likewise I should be surprised you both know the renderer. (I wish he would not use that expression with reference to him!)

“Your only duties,” she went on now in a manner more like the composed and slightly regal one with which she had first greeted him, “well, just to sit with him, by the hour if necessary and speak about anything you think would interest him, or, better, anything which would interest you. . . . And try to change the subject when he mentions anybody or anything which agitates him . . .”

“Mrs. Vaisey,” he began in a voice that had almost a hint of a wail, “you do understand that I have been in prison.”

“I do, I do,” she replied. “But if you think that I believe you are . . . like any . . . prisoner” (she winced after having chosen this word), “you are mistaken. I am a great reader of character. I liked you the moment you came in, and you have in me a friend. Dr. Ulric is made of ice water and steel, Mr. De Lakes. . . . But you will find in me a friend who stands firm in time of trial. . . .”

He could think of nothing to say to this, and then they heard her car in the driveway, and the chauffeur honked the horn in rapid resounding summons that recalled a bugle.

She indicated he must take the limousine and was not to walk home under any circumstances.

“I’ll expect you then tomorrow for sure!” She took his hand through the open window of the car. “And, oh please,” she went on while giving the driver a sign he was to shut off the motor while she spoke. “It would make things easier if we called one another by our Christian names.”

“Our Christian names, yes, ma’am,” he spoke huskily and extricated his hand from hers.

“Again what a stroke of fortune you already have been friends with Gareth! That was quite unexpected . . .”

“It’s good all around . . .”

She smiled and touched his sleeve with her hand.

“It will be something at last to look forward to for him and me.” She gave her final goodbye and nodded to the driver to start the motor.

She stood in the middle of the road waving to him as the car drove away in thick clouds of white, ascending dust.

Sidney could tell at once of course that Vance did not like the arrangement at all. At the same time he bombarded his brother with a hundred questions about the “post,” as he called it, and the great sprawling house where his duties were to hold him, and about Mrs. Vaisey herself.

“You’ll never be able to stand it in the world,” Vance finally gave judgment when Sidney had described his “reception.”

“But, Vance, God Almighty, it’s always you who were telling me I’ve got to go out and face people . . . Now I’ve gone and done it, you’re cross and put out. When even your mentor, Dr. Ulric, is behind my move!”

“Being shut up with a moody, sick boy and his domineering, rich mother is not my idea of getting out and meeting people,” Vance snapped. “And you have no training to be a male nurse which is just what you’ll be.”

“Well thanks, Vance, for your encouragement. . . . At least Irene does not consider that I will be what you call me.” His face grew taut with anger.

“So you call her Irene already?” Vance observed.

“I tried, Vance, to tell you a little about some of the things that happened to me in prison. . . . You say I ought to go out and meet people. Maybe my trouble is I have met too many people while you are the one who’s never been out in the world and seen what it’s like. . . . And you don’t want to see I have changed . . . So taking care of a young man won’t be hard on me after what I went through. . . .”

“You never liked taking care of me when I was a baby . . . Mother told me how nauseated you got when you had to change my diapers, how fretful and restless you were when she left me alone with you . . .”

“You were a very ill-­tempered and irritable brat,” Sidney smiled in spite of himself. “Just the way you are now. . . . But, Vance, prison took all the starch out of me . . . Don’t you see? And I’ll feel I’m doing some good taking care of this boy . . . Besides I used to know him . . .”

As he said this both young men exchanged eloquent looks with one another. The words “the renderer” were on both their lips, for everybody knew that Gareth had also been his pupil.

Partly because the stairs had made him realize he was not so robust as he had been when he was a star football player, Sidney had resigned himself to going by limousine to Mrs. Vaisey’s, though the stuffiness of both the chauffeur and car made him wish he had walked.

He got more than a little panicky though when he alit from the car and stood before the five-­pillared white house. Well, he alibied to himself, one is always a bit nervous on the threshold of a new job. But something else warned him, and he believed his sudden flare-­up of “heart-­trouble” (which the prison doctor had spoken to him about) had everything to do with the young man with the indefinable ailment whom he was to care for.

“I can’t tell you what a weight has been taken off my mind,” Irene Vaisey greeted him as she came out on the endless expanse of the porch and, with a glance at the chauffeur, dismissed him. “I’ve felt positively refreshed, even elated, knowing you will be here to look after him. . . . We won’t ask more of you than that, Mr. De Lakes . . .”

Sidney gave her a look of such questioning and uncertain wonder that she turned her eyes away for a moment. She was the first woman he had talked with for, well, he could not remember actually when. His mother—almost that far back.

“Have you had breakfast, Mr. De Lakes?”

“I thought we were to call one another by our . . . first names,” he broke out of his bashfulness. “Yes, my brother Vance prepared me a little something as a matter of fact.”

“But you could stand with something else, Sidney?” She laughed and took his hand. “Certainly a cup of coffee?”

“I’m not supposed to drink any, but actually I would like a cup.”

Irene Vaisey rang a small bell whose voice thrilled with a pure silver tone which he had never heard before.

A girl dressed in a highly starched apron and little white-­ frilled cap entered with a tray on which a solid silver pot of coffee rested, and two plates filled with cornbread and bacon.

“Just taste a little of each, why don’t you?” At a motion of her hand they both seated themselves.

“You will think me a fool,” she began in a very much altered voice, “when I keep telling you what a burden is lifted by your coming here.”

A short sob escaped from her. “Excuse me,” she said and reached in a fold of her long dress for a handkerchief. “Gareth’s father would have had his heart broken had he lived to see him like this . . . For Gareth was his favorite.”

“But he will recover, Mrs. Vaisey . . . Irene,” Sidney stretched out his hand toward her, but she did not see it, and he let it fall to his lap.

“You’re ready for another cup of coffee, I see,” she said after a pause during which she considered his opinion.

“The task I want you to help me with this morning, Sidney, is actually the most difficult one of all. . . . It is to . . . assist him manage his breakfast . . . You see he refuses to eat . . .”

Snatches of Vance’s warnings and dark suspicions crossed Sidney’s mind.

“I will do most of the task this morning, but if you could from time to time help him . . . chew and swallow just a little of his breakfast . . . It would be a good beginning . . .”

Sidney nodded and tried to look confident.

“I know you’re not squeamish,” she proceeded. “I know too you have been hurt and you will be able to understand others who have been badly damaged also.”

She stood up then and he followed her up the steps.

“You need not go so slow,” he spoke directly behind her. “My condition is not that bad.”

“Just the same, we won’t hurry, Sidney. We have no fixed schedule in this house.”

A flood of orange sunlight rushed upon them as they reached the upstairs landing. The door to Gareth’s room was wide open, but a curtain of heavy silk hanging between door and room protected the interior from visibility.

Mrs. Vaisey flung back the curtain and motioned Sidney to go in first.

Gareth was seated in the same chair he had been in the previous day. Special care had been made with his grooming, and he wore a jacket and brand-­new tie. In his right hand he held a fresh-­cut autumn white rose, which it was clear someone had insisted he hold and which he was wanting to get rid of. Mrs. Vaisey took the flower from his fingers and kissed him on the mouth.

“You remember our good friend Sidney, dear.”

Gareth moved his head in assent.

A man of about thirty entered the room now with a heavy tray which he deposited on the table beside Gareth, who looked at the man fixedly and then gave him what appeared to be an imperious look of contemptuous dismissal. The servant left without a word.

Irene and Sidney had seated themselves, and had anyone passed through the hall and looked beyond the fluttering curtain he would have thought they were waiting for a service to commence.

“I am sure, Gareth,” Mrs. Vaisey broke the silence, “that you are going to be very happy with Sidney. I can feel it, dearest.”

Gareth turned his large, luminous eyes on the new “companion.”

“Garey,” Sidney began, his voice almost bass with strain, “though I have been gone some considerable time and there have been changes in both our lives . . .” He broke off in an excess of emotion. “I will do my best for you, you know that,” he managed to finish.

Gareth turned away from both his visitors.

“Shall we begin your breakfast,” Mrs. Vaisey’s voice also shook, and her eyes rested on the carpet and not on her son. Looking up she saw Gareth shaking his head angrily, and his left hand suddenly disarranged his perfectly tied cravat.

“But you must eat, sweetheart . . . You must keep up your strength . . . And if you are good this morning, Mr. De Lakes will help you also with other things. . . . See what a kind and friendly man he is! He understands our problem, dear, also . . . He has not been immune either . . . to problems . . .”

At that moment Sidney’s spine froze for the youth let out a cry like that of a wild animal which feels a bullet graze its skull. Mrs. Vaisey closed her eyes.

“You must and shall eat,” she said after a pause, and rose.

The youth shook his head, or what now appeared to Sidney as his mane for with his shock of yellow hair he was so like some forest beast.

“We will not put it on, dear heart, if you will only eat.”

Another savage cry came from his throat, which was distended with veins and arteries standing out in clear outlines.

Irene rang, and the servant who had been standing outside returned with a kind of strait jacket, which he quickly and expertly threw over the young man.

Sidney felt faint; ice cold drops of sweat fell from his armpits as they had done in prison. But he was determined to stick it out, he did not wish to return to Vance in failure, and furthermore he wanted somehow to be near this strange troubled boy who did not want food to sustain life.

“Just one piece of bread, that’s all you need eat, darling . . . Just one crumb then, see, from my hands . . .”

With consummate skill Mrs. Vaisey forced open her son’s mouth and placed on his tongue a piece of bread, and then pushed his jaws shut.

“Chew, Gareth . . . Chew!”

His mouth dripping with saliva, he made a supreme effort to masticate the bread while his wide, terrified eyes roved in the direction of Sidney.

Suddenly he moved his head vigorously toward the new “caretaker.”

“You wish Sidney to give you your breakfast?”

Gareth’s eyes widened eloquently.

“I believe he wishes you to give him his breakfast,” Mrs. Vaisey turned to Sidney.

Sidney rose, and looking at Mrs. Vaisey for encouragement and instruction, he lifted a piece of bread to the boy’s mouth. He accepted it and chewed the bread.

“Another, perhaps?” Mrs. Vaisey inquired in a faint voice, hardly that of a whisper.

Sidney had already put another piece of bread in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed this also. Finally a whole slice of bread had been thus laboriously fed to him.

Then as Sidney was withdrawing his hand, the boy took Sidney’s index and middle finger and held them with his bared teeth. Mrs. Vaisey immediately went up to the boy, but there was at present no indication of a wish to hurt or bite, he merely held the fingers gently in his mouth. It was Sidney’s benign calm attitude which prevented Mrs. Vaisey from doing more at the moment. Indeed she waited as calm and resigned as if she had discovered the two of them at prayer.

Without warning Gareth released his hold on Sidney’s fingers, and the new “companion” slipped back away and sat down in a chair which Irene had quickly placed within his reach.

Mrs. Vaisey was busily wiping Gareth’s face and mouth free of crumbs and spittle. It was as if she dared not now look at Sidney. Yet finally she did turn from her “charge,” and advancing a few steps in the direction of the “caretaker” she addressed him almost in a singing tone: “You are priceless . . . I cannot believe my good fortune if you will only stay . . . I had never dreamed anyone like you would come to us . . . I will always be in your debt.”

She then left the room and remained outside the billowing curtain. He barely was listening to her sobs and cries for Gareth was gazing at his new companion with a look of such intense and terrible command that Sidney, deaf now to the happy grief of the mother outside, approached the boy and quickly bending down kissed him on the mouth, a kiss that was as quickly returned.

Sidney came down the endless succession of stairs extremely slowly. Irene Vaisey was waiting at the foot of the staircase, her left hand, which bore an immense yellow stone, was resting on the ancient newel post.

“You look terribly tired, my dear fellow.” She spoke in her rather hard dry voice now. The look of worry and concern for him was wonderfully soothing.

“I’m more . . . happy than tired,” he told her.

She waited a moment for his remark to settle with her, then replied: “You have every reason to be.”

Irene led the way into the dining hall, and from there into a small adjoining alcove. “We’ll be more comfortable in here,” she explained. “You’re positively sure you’re all right?” she returned to the subject of his health.

As a matter of fact he was trembling all over, but his health was not the source of his agitation.

She rang a bell (in this house every room had a bell for summoning somebody).

“Will you have some hot chocolate?”

“Oh, anything,” he spoke almost deliriously she felt. Then he smiled and this smile meant more to her than anything she had received from anybody in years, as her son’s kiss had meant to him.

The maid came again and Mrs. Vaisey issued rather lengthy instructions, none of which he even heard.

“If you will stay,” her voice reached him as if from some parapet, “you will make me the happiest Mother in the world. . . . You don’t know what happiness was mine when I saw Gareth took to you at once . . . You see he could never bear anybody except me even to touch him until today. . . . He let you feed him . . . an entire piece of bread! . . . I do believe he would have eaten the entire loaf from your hands.”

The girl brought in two trays loaded with a hot chocolate-­colored drink, rolls, and tiny silver receptacles of whipped cream by each cup, starched stiff linen napkins, hand-­painted china cups. Sidney drank greedily, his mouth stained with the chocolate drink and whipped cream which he consumed separately.

“Whatever you wish in the way of remuneration,” she began now on more practical considerations, “ask, simply ask . . . Where he is concerned nothing is too much, don’t you agree?”

Then almost without warning, and as in a film where the scene and time sequence change precipitously, and with her voice falling into a low register, she said, “You may or may not know the story of Gareth, but let me tell you to prevent misunderstanding and correct any garbled version you may have listened to. . . . Before our calamity . . .” she had begun, but here the maid had come in to collect the trays and was dismissed by a mere look from her, “we had had no idea Gareth was keeping such bad company, or that he was using, well, a certain drug. We had no inkling of any of that.”

Sidney found himself, to his own consternation, breaking almost into a grin, which she may not have seen, for she went ahead with what she wished him to know: “His father and his two twin brothers were going to get the new horse from the stables over in Virginia. Gareth was the best driver, you may know, and of course he was the oldest of my sons . . .”

“Who were his bad company, ma’am, may I inquire?” Sidney interrupted. She paused only long enough to ignore his question, and continued:

“I begged them not to go that day. All their horoscopes were bad in the newspaper, for one thing. I told them I would drive. They paid no attention to me, Sidney. None whatsoever. . . . It happened at high noon. Gareth had been smoking this drug his friends had been giving him. But he must have seen the train coming, nonetheless, grass or no grass . . . How could he have failed to?”

She stopped and looked at his mouth, perhaps to see if it moved in the strange smile she had caught him in before.

“But I’m a bit ahead of my story. . . . The actual wreck was caused, a witness claims, by a race. Yes, that is correct, a race. A young man riding a horse, according to this observer, passed our truck several times, and the rider is said to have taunted Gareth, shouted abuse at him, and dared him to race him to the train crossing. Another motorist also later told me the same story, but he refused nonetheless to appear at the inquest. (I disremember his name too after all this time.) ‘Let’s race, Garey! Let’s beat the train!’ the horseman is said to have exclaimed. ‘I’ll race you to the train tracks and beat you . . . Will you race me,’ he kept calling, ‘or are you chicken?’ And so they raced, Sidney, raced the train. And the horseback rider got across the tracks in time, and won the race, and me and mine you see did not . . .”

“But who was this . . . rider?” Sidney wondered, absorbed in her account.

Irene sat for a while in deep silence. He was about to repeat his question when she replied: “We never found out. . . . Indeed now Gareth claims he does not remember any ‘race’ or any ‘rider.’ ”

Sidney looked away from her despairing and anguished face.

“There may be many trying things for you, Sidney,” she began again, “should you decide to take this responsibility upon your shoulders . . . I do not want to mitigate the fact that there may be unpleasantness, and rather a lot of it. Even when he was . . . himself, he was a difficult, headstrong, and, yes, passionate boy.”

She watched him drink the hot beverage and eat a large sweet roll heaped with strawberry glaze. He ate, she realized, in order to have something to do, not through appetite.

“You talk as if I was Vance,” he finally spoke with a full mouth, and with a trace of anger in his speech. “As I tried to tell him, prison had everything. They gave me many gifts, Mrs. Vaisey” (he fell away again from using her Christian name). “I’m broken, I guess. They broke me . . . But I can do all you expect or Gareth expects partly because I guess I am broken.”

“You are not broken, Sidney. You are perfect.”

He shook his head dubiously, but again he smiled.

“Then I can expect everything of you?” She sounded, he thought, almost like a conspirator.

“Absolutely,” he replied at once. “Where he is concerned—where you are concerned—everything.”

“As I said before,” she thanked him with her eyes, “it’s more than I could ever have hoped for.”

She picked up her own cup of the chocolate mixture for the first time, brought it to her mouth, and without having tasted it, put it down again noiselessly.

“Do you think later on, Sidney, you might even stay day and night? . . . Take up your residence here, that is . . .”

He hesitated. “I don’t know what Vance would say to that . . . Night and day . . . You see I owe him so much. It was him got me out of prison . . . He went to the Gover-­ nor . . .”

“I know,” Mrs. Vaisey said coldly. “But Vance has Dr. Ulric . . . Doesn’t he?” she added, at a look of confusion from the “caretaker.”

“But it is right,” she continued, “to begin even more slowly with you, Sidney, than we did with the others who took care of Gareth . . . They were after all not ‘called’ to be in charge of him . . . So we will expect you then only during the day for the time being . . . After that we shall see . . .”

He offered to leave then by rising, and she put her hand on his sleeve.

“Never doubt me, Sidney,” she gave him her last word then.

“My back was to the wall until Sidney came.”

Irene Vaisey had confided this sentiment to a yellowing mass of papers which a more ordinary woman might have called her diary. (A lengthy description of the De Lakes boy followed in her fine meticulous hand.)